English M.A. READING LIST
(Effective January 2013 through December 2014)
Student: _____________________________________
Semester of Exam ____________________
Faculty Signature _____________________________
GPC Approval _______________________
A. Pre-1500
1)
2)
3)
4)
The Beowulf Poet, Beowulf
Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “General Prologue,” “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s Prologue and
Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “Clerk’s Prologue and Tale,” “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,”
“Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale,” “Parson’s Prologue”
The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
B. 1500-1600
1)
2)
3)
4)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “A Letter of the Authors,” Book I (all), Book III (Cantos 1, 5-6, 9-12)
a) Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy; Astrophil and Stella 1, 7, 9, 20, 29, 45, 106, Second Song, Fourth
Song
b) Queen Elizabeth I, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" and the "Golden Speech"
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest, Hamlet
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
C. 1600-1700
1)
2)
3)
4)
John Donne, “The Flea,” “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star”), “The Canonization,” “A Nocturnal upon St.
Lucy’s Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” “Twickenham Garden,”
Elegy 19 (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”), Holy
Sonnets 10 (“Death Be Not Proud”), 14 (“Batter my
heart”), and 17 (“Since she whom I loved”), “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Meditation 17” (from
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)
John Milton, Paradise Lost
a) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover
b) Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
D. 1700-1800
1)
2)
3)
4)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism,” “An Essay on Man,” “Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot”
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of . . . George Whitefield,” “On Being Brought from Africa to America,”
“To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” “To S.M., a Young African Painter,” Letter to Rev.
Samson Occom (Feb. 11, 1774)
Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic]”
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
E. 1800-c1850
1)
2)
3)
4)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale
a) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
b) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
c) Sojourner Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman? Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851”
d) Frances E. W. Harper, “Ethiopia,” “An Appeal to my Country Women,” “Woman’s Political Future.”
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Books I & XI, 1805 (not 1850) [Recommended text: Norton Critical
Edition The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth], “Lines Composed a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “The Ruined Cottage,” Preface to Lyrical
Ballads (1802)
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
F. c1850-1915
1)
2)
3)
4)
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain! My Captain!” “In Paths Untrodden,” “When I
Heard at the Close of the Day”
Emily Dickinson, [Recommended Text: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
Little, Brown, 1955] “Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?” (Poem 248), “Over the fence—” (251), “I felt a
Funeral, in my Brain” (280), “Some keep the Sabbath going to church—” (324) “After great pain a formal
feeling comes—” (341) “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (435), “I was the slightest in the House—” (486),
“They shut me up in Prose—” (613), “I dwell in Possibility—” (657)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
George Eliot, Middlemarch
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
G. 1915-1945
1)
2)
3)
4)
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Waste Land
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
H. 1945-1968
1)
2)
3)
4)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
a) Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Blackberrying,” “The Colossus,” “The
Applicant,” “Cut,” and “The Arrival of the Bee Box”
b) Theodore Roethke, “The Waking,” “I Knew a Woman,” “In a Dark Time,” “Root Cellar,” “My Papa’s
Waltz”
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
I. 1969-present
1)
2)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
a) Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed., Introduction and Chapters 1-7
b) Lorna Dee Cervantes, from Emplumada, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” “Cannery Town in August,” “Beneath the
Shadow of the Freeway,” “For Virginia Chavez,” “Poems for the Young Man...,”
c) Cherríe Moraga, From The Last Generation “Queer Aztlán: the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe”; From:
Loving in the War Years, Expanded 2nd ed., “Loving in the War Years,” “La Güera,” “A Long Line of
Vendidas,” “Looking for the Insatiable Woman,” and “Out of our Revolutionary Minds Toward a Pedagogy of
Revolt”
3)
a) August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
b) David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
J. ADDITIONAL LISTS
1)
All students must include at least one numbered item from Section J on their individual exam list.
(Insert the selected numbered item here.)
Elected Works
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
(Complete, if applicable) As indicated by my selections, I am requesting a _____________question instead of the
Thematic question.